The world according to Sven-S. Porst
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While I still utterly fail to see the point of 'blogging conferences' – any description I could come up with will most likely contain the word 'wanking', I somehow came across this, which rightly notes that pointing all your media references to amazon isn't a smart thing. Not only will it put the reliability of your links at the mercy of said company, using its 'ASIN' proprietary numbering rather that ISBN or other, more reliable mean. But also it won't integrate with other resources, such as your local library. I may add that linking to amazon tends not to work very well, as amazon 's offering differ from country to country and linking to amazon.com, say, is somewhere between pointless and needlessly expensive for Europeans.
The post links to something called WorldCat, which aims to be a global combined catalogue of libraries as far as I can tell. That's quite cool. Search for something and it won't only give you the details on that item but also list availability at libraries, highlighting your local one if appropriate. That said, it still seems pretty hard to use as the UI is confusing. But assuming that you could improve the search facilities to match amazon's one-stop solutions, this may be a winner. Then open it to any user rather than to subscribers (i.e. people coming through participating libraries) only and we may happily link there.
The other 'media' thing I read a lot about recently is some 'Media Edition' of Windows. For sure I haven't seen it, but forgetting that it's Windows for the moment it really sounds like a good idea. Shouldn't Apple with their 'Media' and 'Hub' strategy offer something like that? The 5x00 series PowerMacs seem to have been their last – and not too bad – attempt at including things like television (plus the best teletext ever), radio and a remote control into their computers.
October 5, 2003, 17:06
Check out RedLightGreen, which is basically the same thing as OCLC’s WorldCat except that it’s run by the Research Libraries Group, and its constituent libraries are generally academic. The interface is also much, much better.
October 6, 2003, 7:23
Thanks a lot. That looks very interesting and less intimidating than WorldCat.
I took the liberty to follow this up by posting my first impressions.
October 6, 2003, 21:35
Sorry about the multiple pings! Movable Type was hanging up in the middle of my posting process- unfortunately, it appears that it was pinging you each time…
Sorry. :[
-dave
October 8, 2003, 17:09
Sorry about the multiple pings! Movable Type was hanging up in the middle of my posting process- unfortunately, it appears that it was pinging you each time…
Sorry. :[
-dave
October 8, 2003, 17:12
Sorry about the multiple pings! Movable Type was hanging up in the middle of my posting process- unfortunately, it appears that it was pinging you each time…
Sorry. :[
-dave
October 8, 2003, 17:22
Our server likes to act up occasionally - regularly in fact. That may be the reason for the problems you see.
October 8, 2003, 18:03
